Apply to the Fall 2018 YC Growth Program

We are excited to invite interested founders to apply to the Fall 2018 batch of the YC Growth Program. If you would like to be considered for admission, please complete this application. It should take about 20 minutes to complete. The purpose of the application is to learn about your company and to assess your fit for the program. The deadline to apply is August 20, 2018.

The YC Growth Program is designed for companies with between 50 – 150 employees that are scaling rapidly. Ideal candidates are companies that expect to double employees, revenue, customers, etc. in the next year of operation. We will consider applications from companies that are smaller and larger, but will prioritize companies that meet the description above for this first batch. We will be prioritizing YC companies for admission, but plan to include a few companies with no prior association with YC as well.

The program will start on September 26 and conclude in mid-November. We expect to meet one evening per week during this period and in-person attendance is mandatory, with one excused absence allowed. If you know that you can’t make this time commitment, you should not apply. We have limited participation to 15-20 founder-CEOs only in order to accommodate as many companies as possible while maintaining an intimate group size. A big part of the experience is the relationships you build with your fellow founders, so you’ll want to be in the room as much as possible.

The Fall 2018 batch will be the third time we have run the YC Growth Program. Founders have told us that they valued taking part because the program gave them a new peer group facing similar challenges and because it provided a wealth of tactical advice and ideas on how to scale effectively. In their own words:

“When you’re growing your company from 50 to 200 people, you need to hear real stories from others who’ve messed it up, fixed it, and are willing to no-B.S. tell you about it. The YC Growth Program gave us exactly that, across every department… HR, finance, marketing, sales, engineering, product… plus growing into CEOs from the CEOs ahead of us.” —Peter Reinhardt, Segment

“I participated in this program in the spring. It’s about as no-brainer a thing you can do if you’re scaling from 50 to 200 people or so. Classic YC. No-nonsense, all signal, minimal noise.” —Wade Foster, Zapier

“I found the program immensely helpful – both strategic and tactical growth advice and support far beyond what was available from our investors, network, or advisors. Great group of peer CEOs at similar growth stage, excellent speakers, and concrete actionable takeaways we have been able to implement at Rescale after every session.” —Joris Poort, Rescale

“I really enjoyed the program. Out of each of the dinners I got so many valuable ideas and action items that I immediately shared with my team and started to implement at our company. I learned so much in these few weeks, really amazing, I highly recommend it to every company in this phase.” —Stefan Lederer, Bitmovin